as if they are you know, just guests watching you know in someone's home. watching a show on television. >> i think i was reading when i was reading your reporting, i saw someone had texted someone within the white house and said what's going on here, and they sent back the emoji that said this -- i have no idea. jonathan swan, we'll be reading axios a.m. in just a little bit. for you, you can sign up for their newsletter on axios.com. i'm yasmin vossoughian, "morning joe" starts right now. good morning. it's friday. it's just friday may 4th. joe is on assignment. we have a lot to get to. with us to start things off msnbc contributor mike barnicle. donny deutsch is here, republican strategist and political commentator, susan del pursio and law professor at george washington university, jonathan turley and msnbc

analyst john judge sefls. the past few days "the new york times" says the president is losing controlling of his narrative. as of this week, the statement about his health was not actually from trump's doctor, but had been dictated by mr. trump himself. that the president has split with the leaders of his legal team and hired the same new lawyer he denied recruiting. and that mr. trump himself had financed the $130,000 payment intended to buy the silence of the actress known as stormy daniels. the "washington post" reports that when rudy giuliani went on national television wednesday night and said the president had funneled money to michael cohen for the cost of the porn star's nondisclosure agreement, quote neither white house counsel don mcgann, nor emmet flood, the white house attorney recently hired to handle the russia

investigation, knew that trump had reimbursed cohen before giuliani revealed it. according to a source familiar with their thinking. adding that the communications and media staff run by press secretary sarah huckabee sanders did not book giuliani's appearance on hannity's show on fox. and were not involved in helping him strategize his talking points. trump surrounded by faith leaders at yesterday's national day of prayer event, ignored questions and left sanders to face the press. >> can you explain why the president when he spoke, answered questions to reporters a few weeks ago about the $130,000 payment from michael cohen to stormy daniels, why the president was not truthful with the american people and with the people in the room? >> as mayor giuliani stated and i'll refer you back to his comments, this was information that the president didn't know at the time. but eventually learned.

>> when did you specifically know that the president repaid mr. cohen for the $130,000? you personally? >> the first awareness i had was during an interview last night. >> all right. i think it's fair to ask at this point, donny deutsch if you're working for a major company and you are hired to represent it, your company is. and they've given you bad information, one time. two times, three times, and you've put yourself out there and you've had to sort of recant or dance around it. at what point do you leave the company? at what point do you realize your brand or the company itself, is being hurt and you can't help it? >> well, we have a list of about 30 people that you put up last week on the show that have left. >> what would you do? if this was a big car company. were you lying about the car? >> well obviously you part ways. you can't, if you don't have any choice. look. we've talked about donald trump's lack of management style. the giuliani thing is

interesting. we forget, excuse me, how during the campaign, giuliani was unhinged. i mean if you showed clips of him during the campaign, there was a reason he didn't get hired for all the jobs that he wanted to. i spoke with michael cohen yesterday and his remark about giuliani doesn't always know what he's talking about. he said look there's two people that know exactly what happened. myself and the preds and you'll be hearing my side of the story and he was obviously very frustrated with what had come out yesterday. but giuliani, the one other management stupid, stupid thing that trump does, i was a america occ curial guy like trump as a ceo. the last thing i was going to do was double and triple down. probably the way giuliani got there in the first place. one day he was probably pissed, my lawyer is not tough, get giuliani on the phone, he'll do it. that's the thought that goes into it. now we're starting to see the residue and the collateral

damage to that. >> one of the side bars to this story is the arrival on the scene of emmet flood. emmet flood is a highly respected defense attorney in washington, d.c. he has a resumé that unmatched by anyone else who has been representing the president in this case. so he's in there now, he's got to have a tremendous fear of the freelancing that is going on within the white house between the president and rudy giuliani. and jonathan turley, let me ask you -- i was once told by one of the best defense lawyers in this country that his principal obligation to his client, any client. was to take the client's story and make it just a little bit better in an open courtroom. what has happened in your view, legally, to rudy giuliani's attempt to make the president's story -- whatever he tried to make it the other night on tv -- what legal peril does that put the president in, that he wasn't in prior to rudy giuliani's appearance? >> well i believe that giuliani

did serious harm to this case. i also find it astonishing, if it's true, that flood was not told about this in advance. i have to say i've severed clients for less. you know, your client either has to listen to your advice and has to coordinate these types of statements. or you don't have a client. you just have a relationship. so there's a, a very troubling aspect to this. what giuliani did was exceptionally unwise, what he said really didn't materially advance the president's case. changing something from a gift to a loan does not get you out of campaign finance violations. in fact it trips a bunch of other wires. and i think part of the problem looking at giuliani in this interview. we've all been there, many of us have been lead counsels in high-profile cases. when he first went on fox, i thought wow, you are way too comfortable. maybe it was the forum but this

sort of informal back and forth where you're trying to change a narrative, is very very dangerous. and the problem for the president is, facts are not endlessly flexible. you can't just continually change those facts, unless you are just making your pitch to the public and not trying to maintain a legal position. >> well, i'll just tell you that during the transition, donald trump told both joe and me that giuliani was a little out of it. was kind of losing it. and would fall asleep -- it's what he told us. and i don't know if it played into why he didn't become secretary of state. we certainly openly lobbied on the air for that not to happen. because we also thought there was something different with him. >> this is not rudy giuliani gone rogue. this is rudy giuliani with the president's blessing. otherwise it would have ended after the hannity appearance, now he's been out again and

again, including talking late last night to nbc news. giuliani told nbc he made the admission after being told about documents that showed proof of the payment to michael cohen from the president. giuliani, a former u.s. attorney, accused law enforcement of the office that he once led of playing dirty. saying i wanted to get out in front of the special counsel in the southern district of new york. because at some point they would realize this information and leak it. giuliani said i don't think the president realized he paid cohen back for that specific thing until we made him aware of the paperwork. according to giuliani, the president responded oh my goodness. i guess that's what it was for. that's a quote from rudy giuliani to nbc news. he also spoke about serving as trump's lawyer, saying you're not going to see daylight between the president and me, we're going to work hard to have a consistent strategy. as for that strategy, while giuliani insisted the revelation of the secret payments was to prove that trump and michael cohen did not violate campaign finance laws, he ended up managing to tie the revelation

directly back to the 2016 campaign. >> imagine if that came out on october 15th, 2016, in the middle of the last debate with hillary clinton. >> to make it go away, they, they made this -- >> cohen didn't even ask. cohen made it go away. he did his job. >> gosh -- >> it's beyond -- >> jonathan turley, the campaign finance is one question. as you say that has not gone away. contrary to what giuliani and the president believe they did on "hannity" and on "fox & friends" yesterday. what about that piece, isn't that an admission that it was a campaign contribution to make it go away? >> that's why this is so painful to watch. lawyers should have no daylight between himself and his client. but you're supposed to have the client walk closer to you, you're not supposed to just simply be taking the client's rhetorical flourishes. all of these comments seem directed at the public at a time

when you need to direct them at the prosecutors. all of these threats, saying you're going to have the mother of all trial type of threats, are not going to have any impact on the prosecutors, their blood pressure is not going to raise at all. there's a story out that mueller tock a box of subpoenas from the alexandria courthouse. i'm going to go out on a line and say, that's not a good thing. it indicates that the rhetoric and the threats and chest-pounding, it might play well with the president. it's not going to have any impact on the prosecutors except to push them further along the road on a confrontational approach what i don't understand is the end game here -- what happenes if you succeed in this and he hits you with a subpoena? at the end of that road is an appearance in a grand jury without counsel. is there anything more frightening than that idea of the president going into a grand jury, without counsel? >> this is legal d.u.i.

>> how despicable giuliani is, comparing the fbi to nazi stormtroopers. >> to that point, thank you, donny. joe has a new piece in the "washington post" that questions why rudy giuliani would contaminate himself so terribly. it's entitled "rudy giuliani goes from america's mayor, to trump's chump." and he writes in part this -- why america's mayor would now allow himself to become trump's chump is beyond me. with many west wing insiders openly questioning whether the are 45th president will even finish his term, such short-sightedness makes no sense, even when viewed in the most cynical of lights. giuliani has said that in september of 2001, during new york's darkest hour, he drew strength from winston churchill's example. and yet, poor rudy couldn't even stay true to his former colleagues for a month. once trump came calling. we can all thank god that

churchill and not giuliani was on guard when adolf hitler's actual stormtroopers sought to destroy england an lay waste to the rest of western civilization. because unlike giuliani, winston churchill never blinked. this guy, susan del pursio, has gone beyond blimpging, he's totally bought in. and to everybody's question, but jonathan turley, what's the end game here? the end game is not good for anybody who can see clearly. >> and what's so interesting is that at the beginning of this piece, joe outlines what a great job rudy giuliani did turning around the city. that's the administration i was part of. that's the rudy giuliani i know. that's the rudy giuliani i miss. i mean even when you look at that -- >> he's gone. >> he used to give a state of the city, lay out something, lay out what his vision, deliver it without notes. he was fantastic. this interview we saw the other night was disjointed. he went into fisa warrants -- he

should be doing his job. which is to prep the president. not be his pr guy, but be his lawyer. and seeing him take this tack. now i think knowing rudy, he has reason for it. i just don't see how it turned out to his best interests. >> i can't imagine what that would be. >> as we talked about yesterday, the people he is calling stormtroopers is the same fbi he relied on in the days after 9/11, he walked through the streets with a mask on his face, the southern district of new york that issued the subpoena, is where he worked himself. he was the u.s. attorney in the southern district. these are people he knowed, has respected and worked with. >> he was able to sell himself out in this way so quickly. rudy said it would be wrapped up in two or three weeks, he may be wrapping it up just about now. >> that comment flies in the face -- you quoted it yesterday, what michael cohen's reaction was to the fbi coming in. >> he said he was surprised, but they were professional and courteous, not stormtroopers. >> i want to pause again, rudy

giuliani, who by the way i know you loved him back then, i thought he exploited 9/11. >> a lot of people thought he did well, respect. >> he went on national television and compared the fbi, the guys that risk their lives every day to nazi stormtroopers. just let's pause for that a second. what a despicable, despicable pathetic man. i'm sorry. >> danny cevallos. back to the legal questions, giuliani when he talked to nbc news last night said trump made 12 payments, beginning in january of 2017, in installments of $35,000 each to michael cohen and that was the money used to pay off giuliani says, unbeknownst to the president, to pay off stormy daniels. what do those payments look like to you? is that a normal relationship between a client and his attorney? does that look like a retainer to you? what is that? >> i can see giuliani's strategy. what he's trying to do is break up these payments so they don't

appear so connected to $130,000 payment. after all, if trump reimbursed him dollar for dollar in one payment, that would show a real connection through circumstantial evidence. but instead, what i think giuliani is trying to do is show that instead, trump paid a certain amount every month to create this sort of pool of retainer/funds in order to pay settlements as cohen sees fit. the problem with that approach is that at least under the rules of ethics it might create some issues. attorneys have to keep their accounts very, very separate. it's one of the number one reasons why attorneys get in trouble is creating any gray area between their client trust account, and their operating account. so even if this was reimbursement for a loan made by the attorney, which by the way, under new york ethics rules, attorneys aren't supposed to advance the costs of the settlement. they could advance deposition costs and filing fees. but paying a settlement and then

getting reimbursed, is probably running afoul at least in spirit of the rules. and then you have the challenge of this payment coming in, where did cohen put this money? did it go right into his operating account? did it go into his client trust account? did he submit hourly invoices? and then bill that against the client trust account? this money creates a paper trail and characterizing it as a loan as jonathan turley says, trips a lot of wires. so, too, does it, if you characterize it as a retainer. that trips a lot of professional responsibility wires. that requires accounting and that have questions that need to be answered. >> the other point that giuliani has made over the last couple of days is attorneys do things like this. they don't want to burden famous and wealthy people who have busy lives. they do things like paying off porn stars without telling their clients. does that strike you as a convincing argument? something that's common among attorneys.

>> i've been on the plaintiff side and the defense side in negotiating stllts, whether it's a gigantic company or a small business -- the client must be aware of what you're doing on the client's behalf. there is no general fund that a large corporation just gives a single attorney to settle cases at will. first, that's terrible policy for a company. if they create an atmosphere where a potential plaintiff knows that hey, all i have to do is submit a claim and i'll probably get a check for $130,000, one of the things i want to make very, very clear. even if you're dealing with a gigantic corporation or a gigantic government entity, what they see as nuisance value is not $130,000. can you try a case for $130,000. nuisance value even to the largest companies on earth is sometimes $1,000. $2,000. it's not $130,000. and believe me, $130,000 may not

be a lot of their overall worth. but it creates a paper trail and the bosses want to know about it. >> there's much more of a paper trail -- go ahead, mike. >> so danny, $130,000. now mikan colin indicates he got the $130,000 as part of a home equity loan. that's where he drew the money from. so the multiple payments from donald trump to michael cohen, where does the danger, the peril of bank fraud exist here? >> i have several concerns about this. any kind of home -- any kind of loan that michael cohen applied for, he would have had to make representations on paper or electrically, and i don't know that he would have put down that this loan is in order to pay off an adult film star and route it through essential consultants of delaware company. again the more explanations that trump anding giuliani offer for the money, the more layers they create. and each layer requires an explanation at least at minimum to the government, maybe to the

irs. and the challenge is that money, especially in our digital era, money has to wake up somewhere and it has to go to sleep somewhere. and that must be documented. so each time they create, think they're creating more space, they're actually creating more layers that have to be accounted for. >> there are layers of lies that are clear here. it's clear the president lied. we've got on one side of things, michael avenatti looking at this payment, alluding to another payment of $1.5 million that might be related to trump in some way pertaining to a woman. that at some point will have to surface in some way. i just don't know what trump and his chumps think is going to come of this? there's no good way, whether it's mueller or the southern district, they're going to follow the money. they're going to follow the paperwork. thatter going to get to the end of this. so people like rudy giuliani are just making things -- if it's possible -- even worse.

danny cevallos, thank you, appreciate your insight. still ahead on "morning joe," a cnbc headline kind of says it all -- quote "trump leads national prayer day event after saying he repaid lawyer for hush money to porn star." plus sarah sanders has asked why so much information from the white house is factually false. "the wall street journal" editorial board wonders if the president will ever be believed in the case of a national crisis. also ahead, an yut update in the strange story of congress, where paul ryan has back-tracked after trying to force out the house chaplain. what? we'll have the latest on that story. the guy's back on the job. but first, bill karins with a check of the forecast. >> have you ever read that many headlines in a row, mika? >> it's stunning. your weekend forecast, to prepare you for what should be a decent weekend in some areas. we have heavy rain in the dallas-fort worth area, you're going to get drenched this

morning. northern great lakes, a ton of rain going through, the end of our summer pattern is coming. with it will come some thunderstorms late today from pittsburgh toó÷ buffalo to syracuse, to albany and scranton. maybe an isolated tornado or two, especially western new york and western p.a. here's the forecast southeast looks great no problem chicago. minneapolis looks fine. just about everywhere in the west looks really good. we'll going to heat you up in the desert southwest. the weekend outlook, we've got rain through areas of kentucky and tennessee. kentucky derby is going off saturday late afternoon early evening. there could be some showers around, but i don't think it's going to be a washout it won't be too bad. on sunday we get about 30 degrees cooler than we were yesterday. and areas of the northeast. boston, 62 for a high, 65. the best day in the northeast is going to be saturday, sunday is kind of cloudy, cooler with some hit-and-miss showers. we look okay in the southeast on sunday. but watch out for the rain as you go throughout your saturday. especially in mississippi, northern alabama and also through tennessee.

washington, d.c., one more summer, hot day for you today. high around 91 degrees, that will make it three in a row officially a heat wave. you're watching "morning joe." last years' ad campaign was a success for choicehotels.com badda book. badda boom. this year, we're taking it up a notch. so in this commercial we see two travelers at a comfort inn with a glow around them, so people watching will be like, "wow, maybe i'll glow too if i book direct at choicehotels.com". who glows? just say, badda book. badda boom. nobody glows. he gets it. who glows? book now at choicehotels.com

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come see how you can save $400 or more a year with xfinity mobile. plus, ask how to keep your current phone. visit your local xfinity store today. the "washington post" has found that as of may 1st, the president has told more than 3,000 false or misleading claims. yesterday press secretary sarah huckabee sanders was asked about her job in the face of so many presidential lies. >> when the president so often says things that turn out not to be true, when the president of the white house show what appear to be a blatant disregard for the truth, how are the american people to trust or believe what is said here or what is said by the president? >> we give the very best information that we have at the time. i do that every single day and will continue to do that every

day under this position. >> so here's our colleague, nicole wallace, who was communications director for the george w. bush white house. reacting yesterday to sanders. >> two sources told me this week that in the, the reason that sarah huckabee sanders -- i watched the briefing today, and it was a tragedy, it wasn't even a comedy any more. it wasn't funny. she took to the briefing and that room, you could tell when you've lost the room. she has, she lost the room today. today the room wanted to know why she comes out there and spews bs every day. why does she lie to them every day. and i don't know what their recourse is. but i think they're done reporting on what comes out of that podium. because she's now been a proven liar, proven by her boss. one of the explanation is heard is when she goes to the president and asks him about stormy daniels. he has three versions of the truth about stormy daniels in his own mind. and it's like a buffet, whatever version he pulls out is what she gets and that's what she has to serve in the briefing room.

>> nicole wallace as you know served as communications director in the bush white house and would have some insight as to how to do the job. the editorial board at "the wall street journal" is out with new column this morning entitled "the stormy daniels damage" and they write in part, most storms pass, eventually. this week donald trump tried to insure that stormy daniels doesn't rain down permanent distraction on his presidency. though at the cost of further damage to his credibility. mr. trump's public deceptions are surely relevant to his job as president. and the attempted cover-up has done greater harm than any affair would have. now, as more of the story is emerged, he wants everyone to believe a new story, that he could have told the first time. mr. trump is compiling a record that increases the likelihood that few will believe him during a genuine crisis. say a dispute over speaking with the spouecial counsel robert mueller, or a nuclear showdown with kim jong un. mr. trump should worry that

americans will stop believing anything he says. >> mika, here's the problem with that. sobering problem. we, if anybody watched the first 28 minutes of the show. would go, this is a president in free fall beyond comprehension. yeah, his numbers are up. whether that's because of north korea or it's because his base, plus a few just are at this point are still not buying, obviously we'll see what comes out with the indictments, as mueller goes forward. but the real tragedy in this is beyond the presidency. is the mirror coming back that a huge part of this country is just not paying attention. >> and then there's the issue of rudy giuliani, trump's chump and sarah sanders and what category do we put her in? is she another sort of

syncophant, who tells the president, no, i'm not going to lie? or how would you characterize what happens in the press briefings, which are important. it is the white house going on the record. it is the white house's statement or responding to questions and giving the white house's take. have we ever actually gotten the white house's take on any legitimate questions ott of those press briefings? have we ever gotten any truth out of them? have they come to the point where not only has she lost the room, but they've become null and void? >> well and that's the challenge for her right now. and for our country frankly. because let's not forget, she's not just there speaking on behalf of the president. she's speaking to the country if the white house. she's telling the public lies when she goes out there. she's not just lying to the press corps, we know donald trump has no problem telling lies to the press corps. but she's lying to the american public and i think she needs to own that. whether it be her or anyone that goes out there. because unfortunately whoever is going to be at the podium is

going to be in the same exact position as sarah sanders. there's no way to get beyond that. it's so disturbing -- i've been someone, i stood up for clients before, i've had to deal with certain uncomfortable things, but being ignorant or lying about it is just not an excuse. >> no comment a better option? >> well i think not having these, why not not have the briefings? if you're just going to lie, why bother? >> you know mika, we understand talk about this every day, multiple times a day. because it's just a literal tsunami, a fire hydrant of false information coming from this white house every day. but it's larger than that. and the problem and the threat and the danger is much larger than just the white house. just us talking about it. it's what happens out in the country. dealing every day, people dealing every day with the normalization, with the normalization of lies, and deception. coming from the president of the united states and those who represent the president of the

united states. and people get used to it. and people slowly turn off, they hear and it doesn't impact people and they end up not really caring about the fact that the president of the united states is a liar. and that people who represent him lie on a daily basis. this is, this is how democracies die, slowly. right in front of us. every single day. deception and lies become normal. >> mike i'll tell you one thing. it's worse than normal. it's becoming elevated. if donald trump continues to stay in office and succeed, and if donald trump wins the nobel peace prize, not only have we normalized lying, we are celebrating and saying ah, that's the way to the top. it's even scarier than normal. >> that's why we stop at moments like dr. bornstein the other day, a laughable thing, the guy is a weird character. the president of the united states dictated his own medical

records. he invented his own medical records and the those as his own bill of health. we don't know anything about the president of the united states' health. do you trust what dr. ronny jackson said from the podium a couple of months ago. now that we know the president dictated a letter to dr. bornstein. these things fly buy and get buried. they all add up to something bigger and this is why we stop and say, it's an outrage and a skand that will you dictated your own health records. we don't know if our president is healthy. one more lie. >> by the way, rudy, that's the storm trooper play. everything that donald trump has done so many things starting with completely bastardization of the truth. let's go look at storm troopers there, not what the fbi is doing. >> two professors wrote the book "how democracies die" everybody should read it and get former secretary of state madeline albright's book. a group of house republicans

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some developments regarding special counsel robert mueller's investigation, mueller appears to be getting ready to file a number of subpoenas ahead of the trial for former trump campaign chair, paul manafort. in a document filed with a u.s. district court in virginia yesterday, mueller's team requested 70 blank subpoenas. which amounts to 35 total possible subpoenas. because they come in sets. the two-page filing, the two-page filing orders each subpoena recipients to appear at the federal courthouse in alexandria, virginia, at 10:00 a.m. on july 10th, to testify. this filing is in addition to 35 previously requested sets of blank subpoenas. in virginia, manafort is facing several charges including bank fraud and filing false tax returns, he is also facing charges in washington, d.c. manafort has pleaded not guilty to all the charges he faces. >> we're learning that bob mule

certificate focusing on alleged interactions between former trump campaign official rick gates and trump confidante roger stone. sources say the questions have largely been what was discussed at dinners between stone and gates before and during the campaign. sources tell cnbc, stone, a long-time adviser to president trump is one of the top subjects of the investigation into potential collusion between russia and the trump campaign. and an attorney for stone did not deny that discussions between stone and gates took place. but sought to downplay their importance. back in february rick gates pled guilty to two counts stemming from the russia probe. he said to be cooperating with mueller's investigation. >> and finally, in an interview with, with abc news, departing white house special counsel ty cobb addressed the question of who leaked details on more than 40 questions the special counsel robert mueller would like to ask the president.

>> i think it's very difficult to see who if anybody benefits from the leak of that. other than people who have been trying to sabotage the possibility of an interview. and or generate chaos around here. and that list is, that list is too long for me to go through. but i'm not pointing a finger at anybody. >> but to be clear, you say, you say that that list was not leaked by the spouns snl. >> wow, johnthy turley, a lot to unpack. what's most interesting to you, i'm fascinated with your reaction to all the subpoena filings. >> well those subpoenas have two obvious functions. one is it can actually involve additional information that can lead to new indictments, and it locks in testimony of witnesses. once they put that into cement before a grand jury. the penalties are too high to divert. so it's, it can also be a way to

reinforce your case, give awe little bit of insurance. the statements from ty are really chilling. you know he's a very good lawyer. and this is, he's saying what many of us assume. which is that this was a leak for people who wanted to poison the well. people who didn't want him to sit down. that's an extraordinary statement about a legal team that's still divided. but i think that what you see with ty cobb's departure is that the president has decided to go with the worst-case scenario. he's basically decided look, what if i just go ahead and confront mueller, attack him in the media. don't cooperate? let's go straight to that option. there's certain clarity in that. there may even be some cathartic benefits in that. but it could also be catastrophic. even though you're walking away from cooperation, you're leaving all of these people. like cohen, like stone. who are still in the system. and they're going to be very

lonely in a very bad place. so you have to worry that they're going to get a call from a prosecutor saying -- we're the government and we're here to help you. and that is, really a transcendent risk for this president. >> jonathan, one thing i am dumbfounded by, i keep asking michael cohen the same question -- the fact of leaving somebody like cohen out to dry like that with trump. i cannot figure out any strategy other than self-destruction of how he would be hanging michael cohen out to dry. that to me more than anything tells me this is a guy who is not with his faculties right now. >> your conversation with cohen when you reported that cohen told you that basically giuliani doesn't know what he's talking about, that is chilling. if i was counsel for the president, that indicates that they are now on separate scripts. and if they're on separate scripts, they're going to be on separate tracks. cohen at the end of the day is going to be a rational actor.

if he doesn't see much of a benefit of sticking with the trump team he's going to look elsewhere and there's only one place to look. and for cohen, he just saw giuliani shred his arguments in new york. when giuliani said all that money given to him on retainer, that was just to funnel money to pay off a porn star that means he wasn't doing any other legal work. so his attorney/client privilege arguments collapse. the question is once you've eviscerated the guy's only claim to get those documents back, what options are you leaving him with? >> jonathan, give me your legal instinct here. your human nature instinct, i guess more than your legal instinct on two things. one, the conversation we just heard a snippet of from ty cobb about whoever is leaking this, is doing it to do damage to the prospect of the president sitting for an interview with bob mueller. and two, rudy giuliani's

appearance on tv the other night when he further muddied the waters. what is your instinct that this increases the possibility, the odds of the possibility that the president of the united states will end up firing bob mueller? >> well, i'm just assuming that the president has, has learned from the rather steep learning curve of firing comey. because this would be far, far worse. he would lose republicans. just as the house could very well change hands. the biggest problem with what ty cobb is describing is if someone is leaking attorney/client material to, to effectively cut off an option for the president, it raises serious legal ethics questions. if that wasn't done with the consent of the president, you just handed over attorney/client material to the media. and that is a violation. you don't do that. and the idea that you're seeing

lawyers now using leaks to try to influence the course of the litigation, indicates how truly bad this situation may have become. >> it's really bad. and i still think they're flailing around with the stormy stuff. because something is much, this is, what trump does, he deflects. and at this point it's spiraling out of control. jonathan turley, thank you very much. still ahead, the "washington post" eugene robinson writes about what he calls a quote sour smell of panic in the white house. gene joins us at the top of the hour. and david ignatius is joining the discussion next, we're back in just a moment.

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joining us from washington, columnist and associate editor for the "washington post," david ignatius, we want to get your take on this development. congressional republicans are demanding the justice department provide them with a full look at

a memo on the scope of special counsel robert mueller's investigation. the memo which revealed investigators' interest in allegations about paul manafort is largely redacted, and could potentiallyreveal leads the probe has followed. deputy attorney general rod rosenstein is reportedly reluctant to comply with the gop's requests. a former federal law enforcement official familiar with the department's views told the "new york times" that rosenstein and top fbi officials have come to suspect that some lawmakers were using their oversight authority to gain intelligence about that investigation so that it could be shared with the white house. asked about what the president will do, the white house said yesterday "we'll see what happens." david, your thoughts? >> well, the demand by the house republicans is outrageous. there's really no other word for it. to request a road map of the investigation that the justice department is conducting in

which the president is a subject of the investigation, that is to say he is one of the subjects that investigators are pursuing. it's almost hard to imagine a demand like that coming from the nominal oversight body in the house. house republicans have consistently shown they're eager to work with the white house to try to frustrate mueller's investigation, the behavior of the house intelligence committee chairman devin nunes is the best example of that. but it's a broader story, ginning up -- and i think that's the right word -- the idea that in some way rosenstein should be impeached for his conduct when he's done nothing more than follow the procedures and rurals that were given to him takes this investigation into a even more political and potentially damaging chapter. i just hope house republicans realize their actions will be studied by people 20 years from

now. what will they say and do in this period of american history. >> history will judge. >> they will have to live with the words they're using now. >> david, would you agree with the mpremise espoused by some republicans in the house and republicans in the senate as well as many democrats that this request by certain members of the house republican caucus and the prior threat to impeach deputy attorney general rosenstein and the comments made about the information they are requesting come as close as you can come to a definition of obstruction of justice? >>. >> make, that's the right question to ask, the behavior of these house members in seeking to put up roadblocks to the continuation -- successful administration of this investigation at some point do enter into obstruction. we have constitutional questions, the two branches of government are very complicated

ones, aspects of this may end up going before the courts before we're done to sort out roles and responsibilities but it does look as if this is part of a broad strategy on the right to try to derail mueller's investigation before it gets any closer to the president and his prerogatives. >> david, stay with us, we're going to get to your new column in our next hour entitled "should kim jong-un get the credit for the korean detente?" also ahead, rudy giuliani isn't done talking yet. we'll have his new comments to nbc from late last night. plus, the "washington post's" phil rucker has reporting on the comments that blindsided the president's legal team and white house staff. we're back in just a moment. even when i travel... for leisure. so i go national, where i can choose any available upgrade in the aisle - without starting any conversations- -or paying any upcharges.

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right into the harbor. i'm gonna regret that. with new car replacement, if your brand new car gets totaled, liberty mutual will pay the entire value plus depreciation. liberty stands with you. liberty mutual insurance. welcome back to "morning joe," it's friday, may 4, joe is on assignment today. donny deutsch is still with us along with columnist and associate editor for the "washington post," david ignatius, and joining the conversation, we have pulitzer prize winning columnist and associate editor of the "washington post" and msnbc political analyst gene robinson. also, he's taking a risk today, former assistant united states attorney in the criminal division of the u.s. attorney's office for the southern district of new york daniel goldman with the light blue suit on. >> kentucky derby weekend. >> what's that? >> derby suit. >> it was risky but you're just over the line of pulling it off. white house bureau chief at the

"washington post" and political analyst for msnbc and nbc news, philip rucker is with us and former u.s. attorney for the northern district of alabama and an msnbc contributor, joyce vance. great group for this hour. stunning admissions, new excuses and absolutely no warning. the times says says the past few days suggest a president losing control of his narrative and that is what we're talking about this morning. as of this week, it turns out the statement about his health was not from trump's doctor but had been dictated by mr. trump himself, that the president has split with the leaders of his legal team and hired his same new lawyer he denied recruiting and that mr. trump himself had financed the $130,000 payment intended to buy the silence of the actress known as stormy daniels. the kwaup repo"washington post" that when rudy giuliani went on

national television sunday night and said the president funneled money to michael cohen to the cost of the porn star's non-disclosure agreement "neither the white house counsel don mcgahn nor emmet flood knew trump reimbursed cohen before giuliani revealed it" according to a source familiar with their thinking adding that the communications and media staff run by press secretary sarah sanders did not book giuliani's appearance on "hannity" and were not involved in helping him strategize his talking points. trump surrounded by faith leaders at yesterday's national day of prayer event ignored questions and left sarah sanders to face the press. >> reporter: can you explain why the president when he asked questions to reporters a few weeks ago about the $130,000 payment for michael cohen to stormy daniels, why the president was not truthful with the american people?

>> as mayor giuliani stated and i'll refer you back to his comments, this was information that the president didn't know at the time but eventually learned. >> reporter: when did you specifically know that the president repaid mr. cohen for the $130,000. you personally? >> the first awareness i had was during the interview last night. >> reporter: this graph from that "washington post" report that phil rucker co-wrote, "the episode was the latest convulsion for a white house that perpetually navigates turbulence turbulence careening from one crisis to another, most of the president's own making. it has become standard operating procedure for trump and his aides to deceive the public with false statements and shifting accounts, philip, continue with that thought as it pertains to the very precarious position i think the white house press secretary is in at this point and has been for some time but are we at a breaking point?

>> well, clearly, mika, this is not the first time that there have been false statements from the president himself but it's the most recent example but it's a glaring and big one. this is something sarah sanders has denied, she denied president trump had the affair with stormy daniels, she denied that he was involved in that payment. she denied he knew about the payment. trump denied he knew about the payment. of course we learn from trump's lawyer that michael cohen was reimbursed for that payment so trump was aware of this situati situation. this is one of the reasons why sarah sanders is repeating these falsehoods to the american people because she's getting false information from her boss. so if she can't trust her boss, i don't know how she can expect the people. >> i'm not sure where to go with this. it might be gene or donny who works

what she is saying has a very small chance of being true. how does she continue gene, and then donny? how does she continue? >> well, i couldn't. and i think several of us around this table in that situation would resign. >> you have to. >> i couldn't do that. especially when it's revealed publicly that i was kept in the dark and when i went and said something that's just a bald-faced lie.

>> but now we know she knows. >> everybody knows that she knows that what she's saying is not true. >> she's exposed. >> i think that makes her position untenable. >> impossible. >> it certainly would for me and if i were a white house reporter, frankly, why am i going to go sit there for an hour? >> shallow. branding. >> when you hire a spokesperson for a brand, if you were nike and you hire michael jordan, you hire somebody that embodies the brand, the brand value system, so she's exactly that. she is the perfect spokesperson -- forget that she's a liar -- for donald trump because a big part of donald trump's brand is sullenness and lying and that's what she does. so she is the perfect spokesperson on brand for donald trump. that's it. that's the answer. >> beside not telling the truth, her job is to go out and represent to the american people and the press what the president is thinking. in this case she didn't know what the president is thinking because trump and giuliani are

making strategy together, daniel, independent of the bowes communications shot. so she goes out there and says something, she doesn't know that behind the scenes giuliani and trump have cooked up an idea that ghoeshd he should go on had say he made repayments without the press office knowing. so yes she lies, but sometimes she isn't told what's going on in the office behinder will. >> it's worse that she maintains the lie. she doesn't correct herself, she doesn't say that was a misstatement, some explanation or some degree of vulnerability that i wasn't informed of the whole thing and to your point about giuliani and trump, it's almost as if they're sitting around sofa together spit balling ideas. >> it's unbelievable. we're going to get to that now. >> that's literally true. >> literally riffing. and none of them -- well, i'm focused on her because she's the white house press secretary, the person who is going to answer

questions or deliver the white house position on international policy, domestic policy, the way this country is being run. >> look at this president. why would her spokesperson be different? >> she knows what she is delivering when she gives this information too the press during these briefings. she knows there's a high chance it's not true. >> yet she walks out there everyday. >> and giuliani goes on the air and says "it's been proven there's no collusion." this is consistency. why are we questioning why his spokesperson lies when we've opened the show with 3,000 lies trump said. >> i'm questioning something bigger about the office, the white house communications -- the focus of the press briefi s briefings. >> there's the system of going the press office to find out what's going on and getting a true answer. that's the system but that system doesn't work with this administration. >>non-functional. >> and i wonder if we need to

find -- >> she lost the room. >> -- something different to do with that time. >> the problem is, there's no other time to get information out of the white house, the president doesn't get press conferences. >> and this is how it starts, how democracy dies. i'm telling you. >> the defense you make, and our white house correspondents do a good job, is to prevent those contradictions and reveal those lies and say what the white house said yesterday is different than today. >> totally agree. >> giuliani was still talking last night, talking to nbc news that he made the admission about the payment from donald trump to michael cohen after documents showed proof of the payment. giuliani, a former u.s. attorney, accused law enforcement in the office he once led of playing dirty. giuliani said to nbc "i wanted to get out in front of the special counsel and the southern district of new york because at some point they would realize this information and leak it." giuliani went on "i don't think the president realized he paid cohen back for that specific thing until we made him aware of the paperwork."

according to giuliani, the president responded "oh, my goodness. i guess that's what it was for." talking about a payment to stormy daniels. giuliani said "you won't see daylight between the president and me, we're going to work hard to have a consistent strategy." and while giuliani insisted the revelation of the secret payments was to prove trump and michael cohen did not violate campaign finance laws, he managed to tie the revelation directly back to the 2016 campaign. watch this. >> imagine if that came out on october 15, 2016 in the middle of the last debate with hillary clinton. >> so to make it go away that made this payment. >> cohen didn't even ask. cohen made it go away. he did his job. >> so he made it go away, joyce vance, at the point in october 2016 when they were worried it could cost president trump the white house thereby showing it was tied to the campaign. the entire purpose of this

exercise, rudy giuliani said outloud beginning with hannity and continuing in the last couple days was they believe to prove there was no campaign finance violation. have they done that? >> they've done exactly the opposite. what rudy giuliani has done is he has just put down layers and layers of proof as to why the payment was central to the campaign. the language and the statute is whether or not it was intended to influence an election and here we have a payment made right before the election and now we have rudy giuliani saying it was made to keep information that would have been damaging to the president's reputation from coming out before the election and the payment was made by michael cohen in a manner consistent with something being done with this purpose in mind. it's very damaging and harkening back to the conversation that you all started with. this is so much a construct.

it's almost like the play-doh version of the truth. if you don't like the shape the play-doh takes at one point, you crush it and come back with something else. that doesn't work in a court of law where judges and juries are rooting out the truth. that only works in the court of public opinion, at least they hope it works in the court of public opinion and it's a shocking betrayal of the rule of law. it means the president is in many ways abandoning our court process and hoping to make the case to the public and his base. >> you get a sense if there is how he's approaching the stormy daniels stuff are rudy, good lord, mueller will have a field day. eugene robinson, your new op-ed says "one thing and only one thing is clear from this orchestrated attempt to change the narrative about daniels, trump is worried that the payment which prevented a potential scandal days before the 2016 election might constitute an illegal campaign

donation if cohen used his own funds as he haas claim and was not reimbursed. this latest development on the daniels front is one of several signs that the investigation of trump and the pushback against it have entered a new more acrimonious phase. there is no reason to believe mueller's investigation is anywhere near its end but the ground rules have changed. from now on it seems biting and gouging are allowed." and you heard rudy giuliani saying can you imagine if this had been revealed right before the election? she h stated it was a campaign payment of some sort to help the campaign. he's a buffoon to think he can say this was to save the marriage. >> that's stunning, number one. and this is the guy who says i'm going to be making the strategy for trump's defense. >> everyone should be scared if you're on team trump. >> in which case trump is in more trouble than we would have

thought and if giuliani is the only person trump will listen to and that he's going to agree with, what do you think emmet flood feels like now? the new attorney coming in distinguished career coming into this and hearing legal strategy is going to be these two very old very grumpy guys getting around in a room and saying yeah, let's do this, let's do the trump and rudy, and getting it wrong. it's just -- i don't see how anybody functions in this environment. >> i want to go back to joyce's point about trump fighting this in the court of public opinion. we go back to the week of the election where it looked like he was going to loss. he was already seeding the doubts, the election is fixed, it's not right. my question is that trump is seed i seeding a revolution, a civil war. that he understands what's coming and that his own play is to get a huge part of this

country to stand up and tyke ak the streets and say this is unfair. how from a legal background, how does that play into any legal dealings? >> well, it doesn't. it's a political thing. giuliani should be ashamed of himself. for someone who led the office that i worked in for ten years and in the '80s and did the most significant organized crime cases. >> took down the mob. >> absolutely. and he is a legendary u.s. attorney it catapulted him to become america's mayor. for him to turn around and start attacking the institutions that built his career is shocking and it just shows the depth people will go to to subvert the rule of law in in favor of partisanship. it's almost as if there's an

aby abyss. and you're right, donny. there is some -- if you think giuliani might be crazy like a fox, rationale where you say trump did repay the money but after the election. so michael cohen didn't intend to give a campaign contribution before the election and to go out to the american people and say he looked at the payments he was making and he was like, oh, that must be what it was for. >> good god. >> that's preposterous. >> thank you but no. >> i guess the argument is he was paying a retainer. giuliani said there were 12 payments of $35,000 he regularly made. is there any way you can see it as a former assistant u.s. attorney that cohen just took a

standard retainer fee and used it unbeknownst to the president to make this payoff to stormy daniels? >> no. there would have cob -- you can pay someone a monthly fee to be an attorney, that's essentially a salary. that's their work for you. now if you have an agreement that you make whatever deals you want and pay off these people with this money, that's not really a retainer for his work, that's actually just a slush fund to pay off these women or whoever it is. so that argument is not going to hold up very well. >> so joe has a new piece for the "washington post" out this morning about rudy giuliani. in it joe writes this "why america's mayor would allow himself to become trump's chump is beyond me. with many west wing insiders openly questioning whether the 45th president will even finish his term, such short-sightedness

makes no sense, even when viewed in the most cynical of lights. giuliani has said that in september, 2001, during new york's darkest hour he drew strength from winston churchill's example and yet poor rudy couldn't even stay true to his former colleagues for a month once trump came call canning. we can all thank god that churchill and not giuliani was on guard when adolf hitler's actual storm troopers sought to destroy england and lay waste to the rest of western civilization because, unlike rudy giuliani, winston churchill never blinked." david ignatius, we've been talking about this, what giuliani has done to himself even in the last 48 hours or so. how go you explain it? is it a bid for relevance? we know why donald trump is doing it. it's a guy he's known a long time, a guy he trusts, a guy he spent time with in new york city and believes will fight for him. what's giuliani doing here, though? >> i think giuliani wants to help his friend donald trump.

i think giuliani has wanted since trump was elected to be in the spotlight, he wanted to be secretary of state, that didn't work out. this is a very prominent role, he has a lot of self-confidence and he goes off and wings it and gets himself in more and more trouble so i think it's a mix of personal vanity and a genuine desire to help his friend. i'm struck by the image of an animal that gets caught in a trap and the more the an quality squirms to get out of a trap and deeper in, the tighter the lock is until finally it was a desperate what do you do? the animal loses a limb or just ends up -- >> wow. >> they're caught! hey, david ignatius. >> wow. >> we watch them flailing everyday in this trap and i don't know -- this is not going to have a happy ending for giuliani. we'll see about the rest of

them. >> are you envisioning possum or raccoon, bear? >> i'll leave the animal in this trap to all of you. >> joyce vance, help. seriously, though, what to you at this point -- we're staggered. rudy giuliani, go, joyce vance, what's your gut? >> i'll take us away from that dangerous animal kingdom territo territory. rudy giuliani wanted to be in the room where it happens from the beginning of this administration and now that he's there he seems to be a little punch drunk on the experience. he's gotten out so far ahead of where any competent legal strategy would have gone for this president and the real question at this point is whether the damage that has happen topd the president's legal position in the last 48 hours can ever be undone, whether emmet flood or anyone else can come in and find a way to take this version of the facts that's been revealed and bring it back into territory

where the president is not on the hook for campaign finance violations, where there's not this increasingly dangerous litany about the comey firing that serves to nail down where everyone believes mueller is headed towards obstruction of justice and to lead us further into collusion and those issues. it looks like national prayer day -- which was the day yesterday was designated -- was not the day that answered the president's prayers. >> phil rucker, how is this playing inside the white house? . we've been talking about sarah sanders saying she just learned about this revelation, the payment to michael cohen, to stormy daniels, by watching rudy giuliani on hannity. what is it like to be in the white house right now as you cover it when it appears that donald trump and rudy giuliani are making strategy and policy on their own? >> it's chaotic but not that surprising. white house aides have no idea what is going on with rudy

giuliani. he's out there freelancing and talking to the president directly and not talking to them and my colleague ashley parker was testing with the west wing aide yesterday who sent a bunch of emojis including a basket of popcorn in a text message to describe what this was like. they're sitting back like we are watching it unfold. >> one thing about rudy. i've been saying since his speech at the republican convention that there is something off about rudy giuliani. this is not the giuliani we know. it just isn't. >> if you show tape of that -- >> trump told that to me and joe in private when he was -- and we talked on the air because we told him no for secretary of state like that's a bad idea joe september saying it on the air for days and days and days and he said to us that he was way off and kind of weird and falling asleep. >> trump said that? >> trump said that to us during the transition.

>> and then he hires him as his personal attorney? >> giuliani said donald trump's son-in-law is disposable. let's say that again. he's disposable. that's what he said on national television. so i don't know what to ask you. what's next? >> there's going to be some move by robert mueller. we've been hearing about no collusion, no collusion, there was no collusion. you'll never hear about collusion until he drops an 08-page indictment that charges any number of different people and then you'll hear a lot. so the whole theory that we have this house investigation which by all accounts was not a fulsome investigation, that's not establishing that there was

no collusion and what we're seeing is there is smoke there and so i would expect that at some point within the next couple of months we may have an indictment. i do not think it will be trump but it may be others who are involved in the -- who are involved in the campaign and then in parallel track you have the southern district of new york that is proceeding apace with this michael cohen investigation and what is i think very concerning and part of the reason you see this tack of giuliani and trump moving to pure attack mode, emmet flood is in, ty cobb is out and it's an attack that will be asserting more executive privilege, trying to go to court to litigate this and delay as much as possible because there's starting to be a strong sentiment that michael cohen is in trouble, he's likely to be indicted unless he decides to cooperate first and robert mueller is starting to hone in

on some very, very serious business. >> joyce vance, philip rucker, daniel goldman, thank you all. gene, stay with us. still ahead on "morning joe," one theory to rudy giuliani's publish push is that he's trying to take the pressure off michael cohen. one person who doesn't see it that way, michael cohen. "vanity fair's" emily jane fox has new reporting on how the president's long-time lawyer is sizing up this week's developments. we'll be right back.

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i can't be your it guy anymore. what? you guys have xfinity. you can do this. what's a good wifi password, mom? you still have to visit us. i will. no. make that the password: "you_stillóhave_toóvisit_us." that's a good one. [ chuckles ] download the xfinity my account app and set a password you can easily remember. one more way comcast is working to fit into your life, not the other way around. joining us now, former treasury official steve rattner and senior reporter at "vanity fair" and contributor to nbc news and msnbc, emily jane fox. she is the author of the highly anticipated upcoming book titled "born trump, inside america's first family." >> she's got everything. >> when is it coming out? >> june 19. >> preorder now. speaking of the first family, donny mentioned this in

our last block. it's not just michael cohen that may have seen big red flags in rudy giuliani's recent interviews. the president's own son-in-law is being described as "disposable." >> what? >> i think i would get on my charger and go right into the -- their offices with a lance if they go after ivanka. if they do do ivanka -- which i doubt they will, the whole country will turn on them, they're going after his daughter? >> what about his son-in-law? they talked about him. >> i guess -- jared is a fine man, you know that. but men are disposable. but a fine woman like ivanka? come on. >> emily, what does that mean. he did say men are disposable, he didn't specifically say jared is, but that's an incredible statement about the president's son-in-law. >> i think it came off as a joke and what he was trying to say was in a joking manner but in all jokes there's some truth, every comedian knows that. i have talked to a handful of people, especially in reporting

the book and for "vanity fair" who are close to the president who said if it comes down to it, there's no question jared will be thrown under the bus. if the president is presented with a choice of saving himself or his son-in-law jared is out before you can say jared. >> before you can say boo. so daniel goldman, we haven't talked about jared. is he in any legal jeopardy here? >> he's sort of flown under the radar, as he generally does, in this white house but i think in looking at this case and in looking at what he was involved in, he was at that june, 2016 trump tower meeting. he was very integrally related in the transition and in some of the charges against michael flynn. i think jared kushner is in some real legal jeopardy and he doesn't -- he's not spoken up very much but he's someone who was wrapped up in a lot of events that bob mueller is

looking at and you can read from the court filings and some indictments against paul manafort, michael flynn and what we know about him both from his indictment and from reporting as well, i don't think michael flynn is -- criminal activity has been fully exposed. i think there's more to it that will come out as this case proceeds. i think there may be more paul manafort collusion that comes out. remember that rod rosenstein extended the scope of the mandate to include collusion related to manafort in addition to all of the money laundering, bank fraud, and tax fraud crimes that he's already been charged with so bob mueller is keeping the collusion aspect very close to his vest and i would expect at some point that is going to come out and people should be nervous, jared kushner should be nervous, roger stone should be nervous, paul manafort -- there may be more indictments against

him. we have not heard the last of it but we don't hear very much about kushner but i don't think that means bob mueller is not focusing on him. >> i don't know if this is important but i remember during the transition both on and off the air joe and i questioning what is it with rudy giuliani and michael flynn what is it with these decisions and we would ask jared off the air the same thing we'd ask on the air and he was very much a supporter of rudy being secretary of state, he wanted that, he was pushing that in a big way and he was extremely defensive of michael flynn. he said you've got to understand, you may not support michael flynn as national security adviser but he really understands donald, he travels with him -- these are jared's words. he calms him down. they have a special relationship, a bond where they're always together, always talking. flynn kind of -- he didn't use this word but almost babysits him, is always minding him and jared was the one who was constantly pushing those

relationships between rudy giuliani and michael flynn and obviously, steve rattner, follow the money. >> there's another piece that we haven't talked about, there's collusion, there's stormy daniels but there's also the money and we think or no or believe that robert mueller has access to deutsche bank financial records, he's probably subpoenaed other financial records. >> there's no questions jared's financial dealings are complicated. we don't know much but i suspect there's stuff in there so there's this whole other area that involves jared of whether he's used his government position to advance his ownable if -- >> we haven't seen him much. >> listening to your description, that's an insane qualification for the job. the care and feeding of the president. >> he sits with him on planes. >> we were talking with donny a couple blocks ago about michael cohen and his reaction to watching the last 48 hours of

rudy giuliani explaining how the repayment happened. you have -- you are well sourced in michael cohen and his world. what's your view of how he's feeling today about rudy giuliani? >> from my reporting, for the second time a week a, an intervw on fox news did nothing to make michael cohen's life easier, it caught him off guard and this is someone spending at least ten hours a day with his lawyers trying to help his own case and the president and rudy giuliani have gotten on tv and hurt his case and from any person in that position, no one wants to be in a position where at a time when you think someone should have your back and it's important to have your back, it's a silly thing for these men to have done. >> here's what i don't understand about cohen. he's worked for trump for a long time. it's like the question i was asking about sarah sanders in the briefing room. everyone knows there's the high

chance she will lie and she knows a lot of what she said in that room turned out not to be true so she knows she's not -- there's a good chance she's not being fed good information by the white house, by the president. if michael cohen has spent years with trump, is he not smart? does he not see what happens right in front of him with donald trump's behavior, lies, abuse of people, backing out on deals? he's on the inside. what would make him think that there would be any loyalty? >> all i can tell you is from every single time i've interviewed him over the course of the last nine months is he has described donald trump and his family as his family. so i think that is the way that he saw this and that's the way he saw his relationship and you have to remember that since the stormy daniels news broke, donald trump brought him back into his orbit. they didn't speak much for the first year of his administration and once that news broke they started talking frequently.

he went down to mar-a-lago to visit two times so perhaps his feeling toward the relationship had changed back and he was kind of on the inside again and everyone knows being on the inside around donald trump is an intoxicating thing for a certain group of people. >> only on the inside until he decides he doesn't need you anymore or you're a liability and then you're out and cohen has been through that once so he's a complete idiot if he doesn't see. >> it's like "arrested develop developme development," the attorney. >> and michael cohen has been used by donald trump. he told his lies about this home equity loan to finance this thing, now we're asked to believe he was paid a retainer of $35,000 a month that he could use to take care of problems. do you really believe he made those payments to stormy daniels without donald trump knowing at the time? i'm not talking about two weeks ago. so he's been telling these lies and he has himself caught in a web of lies. >> i think as donny said earlier, he is going to have a story to tell and i think we all

look forward to hearing him tell it. >> david ignatius, jump in. >> just one additional thought. we don't know how much material was taken in the raid on michael cohen's apartment and office. but cohen does. and he knows whatever exposure there is, i wonder if trump himself knows all that might be there. but i just suspect this is one of those stories where we see a little bit in what's public. we see giuliani reacting to a little bit but i suspect there's a much larger dimension in material that cohen was keeping in areas we may not know about yet. >> a lot to unpack. emily jane fox, thank you. daniel goldman, thank you. emily's new book "born trump, inside america's first family" will be out june 19. it's a doozy. we look forward to it. coming up, our next guest

says rudy giuliani reminds him of a formerly great major league pitcher who has completely lost his fastball. the campaign manager for president obama's 2012 reelection campaign, jim messina, joins the table ahead on "morning joe." i feel a great deal of urgency... i think, keep going, and make a difference. at some point, we are going to be able to beat als. because life is amazing. so i am hoping for a cure. i want this, to uh, to be a reality. um, yeah.

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all right, david ignatius. your latest piece is entitled "should kim get the credit for the korean detente" and you write in part this. "president trump deserves credit for seizing the moment for negotiations with north korea but some little-noticed documents reveal that kim jong-un has been planning his denuclearization offer and the opening to the united states for the past five years. could kim have moved toward negotiations regardless of who was president? we'll never know but there's no denying that trump's confrontational approach created an opportunity for crisis diplomacy and that he was bold enough to embrace kim's offer of direct talks. kim is like an illusionist who tells you what trick he's going to do and then does it before your eyes, daring you to guess the secret. trump sees himself as a clever confrontational deal maker, but he may have met his match with

the kid from pyongyang." there's more. tell us -- people say what if this works out. it would be good, but would it be trump? well, it would be good and you want to bet on diplomacy. what i tried to do in this peace is lay out the history using north korean documents that have not gotten much attention of how kim jong-un began talking about denuclearization, began talking about a desire to open dialogue with the united states, began talking about his desire to complete his nuclear weapons program and then pivot toward the economy back in 2013. five years ago. and regularly since then in little north korean statements, speeches, party announcements you can find examples of this same line that they have a term for it, it's a korean word that means basically two prong, dual approach stressing both nuclear

weapons and the economy and that takes us right to where we are and i don't want to detract from president trump's taking the north korea problem seriously from the moment he got into office, he did and he's obviously part of this story but i'm struck as i look at this at this remarkable 32-year-old north korean leader. within two years of his taking power in 2013 already seemed to have a vision of where he was going. it's a pretty interesting story. we'll see if this leads to a real agreement and denuclearization but you have to say kim jong-un has set the table for process that could make north korea a very different country. >> david, steve rattner. this is fascinating and we'll see how it unfolds, but the part i'm not quite understanding the logic of, maybe there is no logic, if he decided five years ago that this is where he wanted to be, why go through five years of trying to test his icbms,

scare us more, get a bunch more sanctions imposed and have to live through more economic saturdayship. why not just make this deal three, four, five years ago? >> weird as it sounds, when he first enunciated this policy in 2013 he said precisely that, that he wants -- he wanted his nuclear deterrent to have military strength but he wanted to revive this impoverished really backward north korean economy and bring it into the modern day. you have to remember this is somebody who did his schooling in switzerland. he grew up seeing prosperous modern europe. he's aware through social media of the explosive economic growth across the border in china so it does seem as if he had an idea that if he was strong enough through having nuclear weapons he could make the pivot. he announced the pivot very specifically on january 1 this year and said we have achieved

what i set out to do five years ago, we have a nuclear weapon, now it's time for us to move into this engagement and diplomacy. so the interesting thing is this young man has been the driver of this process. i think trump has been smart enough to be there and catch the moment and i hope in a good way. >> david, thank you very, very much. eugene robinson, thank you as well. we'll read both of your columns in today's "washington post." still ahead, it's been less than three months since the parkland shooting shook the nation's gun debate. today the president is heading to dallas to address the annual nra convention. we'll get a live report. "morning joe" is coming right back.

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>> when the president so often says things that turn out not to be true, when the president of the white house showed what appears to be a blatant disregard for the truth, how are the american people to trust or

believe what is said here or what is said by the president? >> we give the very best information that we have at the time, i do that every single day and will continue to do that everyday i'm in this position. >> joining us now is the president and ceo of the mess seen that group, jim messina, a former deputy white house chief of staff and campaign manager for barack obama's 2012 reelection campaign. i ask you what i've been asking before, i'm at a loss as to how the press secretary proceeds in this position, she lost the room yesterday is what i'm hearing and -- but more importantly, she knows that the information she's getting is not true and she's exposed as knowing that because she's a smart woman. >> when i was deputy chief of staff for operations i would have walked in and said to her do you want to quit or do you want me to fire you? you have no ability to talk to the press anymore. it's not her fault, right?

>> no. >> it's the leader of the country's fault and there is no process in there, there's no communications director, there's no functioning chief of staff. there's no one -- the president and his new lawyer decided to go out and lawyer decided to go out and blow up their strategy and didn't tell anyone else. in a modern white house, there would have been a process, boarded this every day. when you say, by the way, the president of the united states lied to the country, you have strategy for this. >> right. >> instead, the only two people that knew the strategy were the president and rudy. >> there are some people in the white house who you wonder if they are staying in there as a sense of duty, especially in the national security realm. >> sure. >> but, in this case, could she do more good for the country by actually taking a stand and saying i will not do this

anymore? or is she -- is there a sense of duty? am i missing something as to why she is still doing that job if she that has brains that i think she has? >> yep. i feel the same about john kelly. >> yeah. same question about him. >> we were taught to respect generals and trust them. i trusted him on monday when he called the president an idiot. i believe he is an it idiot. >> i am concerned who is in my place. you can't do that with sanders. >> at some point, you have to stand-up and do what is right and say i'm not going to be part of this. this is about me, too. this is the country saying this is no longer acceptable. >> if i put myself there and believe in myself and see how dangerous trump is, it's not just a rationalization. i am doing the best. i need to protect our country. >> donny, they are enabling

them. >> i'm not talking sanders. >> both. >> for all these guys, ladies and guys, there's a line. up to a line, you want to serve your country. it's my job. the president isn't perfect or my boss isn't person, at some point you cross a line or the president crosses a line and you cannot work for him anymore. what donny is saying, perhaps it crosses the line. anybody with any decency will say, i can't work with this guy anymore. >> that's the problem across the administration. so many jobs open and no competent people want to work in that administration. you have the dumbest of the dumb who want to hang out. >> jim, you are an oracle to the democratic party i want to ask you about a poll that came out two days ago, suffolk university poll in the state of new hampshire looking forward to a presidential primary among democrats, elizabeth warren, joe biden and bernie sanders.

i know you don't put a lot of stock in a poll at this point, but a lot of democrats are talking and have been talking about who are we going to put up to defeat donald trump? this is really a story about donald trump. when you look at the numbers, look at the snapshot. other people will come along. what do you see about the party? >> the party is at an inflection point. what is happening is people want the strongest person that can stand-up and punch donald trump in the face. right now, the polls reflect people who are yelling the loudest. 20 people want to run for president of the united states. remember, eight years ago, barack obama trailed hillary clinton at this date by 41 points in iowa, ended up winning iowa and becoming the president. you know how i feel about polls. especially now, what you are seeing is anger. eventually, you are going to see politics in iowa and new hampshire, people going to all 99 counties and every clam bake

in new hampshire and making their case. you are going to see those numbers change. >> aren't the voters angry and they want to see you punch him in the face. people are furious about donald trump and what he's doing. don't they want to elect the person that will say the toughest things possibly said from a podium about donald trump? >> in the end, democrats are realists and want to make sure they can win. >> can you please tell the temperatures if they run elizabeth warren or bernie sanders, we will have mcgovern/nixon. can you explain a become, somebody who is a sen tryst, it is political suicide to run elizabeth warren? >> i met 18 of those people. it isn't obvious to me who it is that is going to come forward and call us as a centrist. somebody with the barack

obama/bill clinton charisma to bring them together. who is it? >> there are a couple young stars. the mayor of l.a. has some real star power. i like john hickenlooper, the governor of colorado. i think we are asking the wrong question. modern campaigns, justice of the peace -- george w. bush and barack obama. barack obama did both as did bill clinton and george w. bush. we need a candidate that can do both. part is pushing back against this ridiculous president. >> it's been a crazy week. still ahead, is there enough damage control to undo what rudy giuliani has done to the president's legal case? we have a lot to cover tabt implications about the trump and r rudie show. "morning joe" is coming right back. there was an idea.

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turley and danny. we begin this morning with stunning admissions, new excuses and no warning. "the new york times" says it last few days suggest a president losing control of his narrative. quote, as of this week, it turns out the statement about his health was not actually from trump's doctor, but had been di dictated by mr. trump himself. the president split with the leaders of his legal team and hired the lawyer he denied recruiting and mr. trump, himself, financed the $130,000 payment intended to buy the silence of the actress known as stormy daniels, a porn star. "the washington post" reports when rudy giuliani went on national television wednesday night and said the president had funneled money to michael cohen for the cost of the porn star's nondisclosure agreement, quote,

neither white house counsel don mcgahn knew trump reimbursed cohen before giuliani revealed it, according to a source familiar with their thinking. adding that the communications and media staff run by press secretary, sarah huckabee sanders did not book giuliani's appearance on hannity's show on fox and not involved in helping strategize his talking points. trump, surrounded by faith leaders at yesterday's national day of prayer event, ignored questions and left sanders to face the press. >> can you explain why the president spoke of the questions about the $130,000 payment to michael cohen to stormy daniels why the president was not truthful with the american people and the people of this room? >> as mayor giuliani stated and i'll refer you back to his

comments, this is information the president didn't know at the time and learned. >> when did you specifically know the president repaid mr. cohen for the $130,000, you personally? >> the first awareness i had was during the interview last night. >> i think it's fair to ask at this point, donny deutsche, if you are working for a major company and hired to represent it, and they have given you bad information one time, two times, three times and you put yourself out there and had to recant or dance around it, at what point do you leave the company? at what point do you realize your brand or the company, itself, is being hurt and you can't help it? >> we have a list of 30 people that we put up last week that left. >> what would you do if this was a big car company, you are lying about the car? >> obviously, you part ways. look, we have talked about donald trump's lack of

management style. the giuliani thing is interesting. we forget, excuse me, how during the campaign, juligiuliani was unhinged. there's a reason he didn't get hired for all the jobs he wanted to. i spoke with michael cohen yesterday. he said giuliani doesn't know what he's talking about. he said there are two people that know what happened, myself and the president. you will hear my side of the story. he was obviously very frustrated at what had come out yesterday. but, jugiuliani, the one management stupid thing trump does, i was a guy like trump as a ceo. i surrounded myself with temporary people. the last thing i was going to do is double and triple down. the way giuliani got there in the first place, one day he was pissed, my lawyers are not tough enough. get rudy on the phone, he'll do it.

that's the thought. now we are seeing the residue and collateral damage. >> one of the side bars to the story is the arrival on the scene of emmitt flood. he is a highly respected defense attorney in washington, d.c. he has a resume that is unmatched by anyone else representing the president in this case. he is in there now. he's got to have a tremendous fear of the freelancing that is going on within the white house between the president and rudy giuliani and jonathan turley, let me ask you, i was once told by one of the best defense lawyers in this country, his principle obligation to the client is take the client's story and make it just a little bit better in an open courtroom. what has happened, in your view, legally, to rudy giuliani's attempt to make the president's story, whatever he tried to make it the other night on tv, what legal peril does that put the president in that he wasn't in

prior to rudy giuliani's appearance? >> i believe he did serious harm to the case. i also find it astonishing, if true that flood was not told in advance. i have severed clients for less. your client either has to listen to your advice and has to coordinate these type of statements or you don't have a client, you just have a relationship. there's a very troubling aspect to this. what giuliani did was exceptionally unwise. you know, what he said really didn't materially advance the president's case. changing something from a gift to a loan does not get you out of campaign finance violations. in fact, it trips a bunch of other wires. i think part of the problem, looking at giuliani in this interview, we have all been there, lead counsels in high profile cases. when he first went on fox, i

thought, wow, you are way too comfortable. maybe it was the forum. this back and forth where you are trying to change a narrative is very, very dangerous. the president obama for tis fac changeable. you cannot change the facts unless you are making your pitch to the public and not trying to maintain a legal position. >> well, i'll tell you, during the transition, donald trump told joe and me that giuliani was a little out of it, kind of losing it and would fall asleep -- >> you could see it. >> it's what he told us. i don't know if it played into why he didn't become secretary of state, we certainly openly lobbied on the air for that not to happen because we also thought there was something different with him. >> what's interesting is this is not rudy giuliani gone rogue, this is rudy giuliani with the president's blessing, otherwise, it would have ended with the

hannity appearance. he's been out again and again. giuliani told nbc he told the admission after being told of document that is show proof of the payment to michael cohen from the president. rudy giuliani accused law enforcement of playing dirty saying i wanted to get out in front of the special counsel in the southern district of new york because at some point, they would realize this information and leak it. giuliani said, i don't think the president realized he paid cohen back for that specific thing until we made him aware of that paperwork. the president responded, oh, my goodness, i guess that's what it's for. that's a quote from rudy giuliani to nbc news. he spoke of president trump's lawyer saying you are not going to see daylight between the president and me. we are going to work hard to have a consistent strategy. he insisted a revelation of the secret payments was to prove trump and cohen did not violate

campaign finance laws, he managed the tie the revelation back to the 2016 campaign. >> imagine if that came out on october 15th, 2016 in the middle of the last debate with hillary clinton. >> to make it go away, they made this -- >> didn't even ask. cohen made it go away. he did his job. >> gosh -- >> jonathan turley, the campaign finance is a one question. as you say, that has not gone away, contrary to what giuliani and the president believe they did on hannity and "fox and friends." isn't that an admission this was a campaign contribution to make it go away? >> that's why it's painful to watch. a lawyer should have no daylight between himself and his client, but you are supposed to have the client walk closer to you, not take the client's rhetorical fleurishes.

all the comments seem directed at the public at the time they need to be directed to the prosecutors. the threats saying you are going to have the mother of all trial threats are not going to have an impact on the trial lawyers. they are blood pressure is not going to raise at all. mueller took a box of subpoenas from the alexandria courthouse. i'm going to go on a line and say that's not a good thing when the prosecutors are getting subpoenas by the gross. it indicates all this rhetoric, all these threats, all this chest pounding might play well with the president. it's not going to have an impact on the prosecutors exception to push them further along the road of a confrontational approach. i don't understand the end game here. what happens if you succeed and he hits you with a subpoena. at the end of the road, is an appearance of the grand jury without counsel.

is there anything more frightening than the president going into it without counsel? >> rudy giuliani goes from new york's mayor to trump's chump. the number of lies he has told since taking off sis. sarah huckabee sanders replies to questions about the administration's trouble with the truth. you are watching "morning joe." we'll be right back. so, you guys have recently started dating... yes. - yes. a little less than a month. coming up on two months now, yeah... cool. so, i want to show you guys these three chevy suv's. the first one is called the trax. beautiful! do you think it would be good for moving in together? moving in together?! ahhh! - ahhh! okay, well, this is the chevy equinox... wow. nice. perfect for when you two have your first kid. give me some time... okay, this is the traverse. for when you have your five kids, two dogs and one cat. (laughter) whoa! five? ahhh... well, no matter what stage of life you're in chevy has an suv for you. you have it all planned out, thanks. but prevagen helps your brain with an ingredient originally discovered...

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such shortsightedness makes no sense. giuliani said in september of 2001, during new york's darkest hour, he drew strength from winston churchills power. he wouldn't stay true to former colleagues for a month once trump came calling. we can all thank god churchill, not giuliani was on guard when hitler sought to destroy england and lay weights to western civilization. unlike rudy giuliani, winston churchill never blinked. this guy, susan, has gone beyond blinking. he's totally bought in and into everybody's question, what is the end game here? the end game is not good for anybody who can see, clearly. >> what's interesting is at the beginning of that piece, joe outlines what a great job rudy giuliani did turning around the

city. that's the administration i was part of. that's the rudy giuliani i know. that's the rudy giuliani i miss. when you look at that picture -- >> oh, he's gone. >> he used to give a state of the city, lay out something, lay out his vision, deliver without notes. he was fantastic. this interview was disjointed. he went into fisa warrants. he should be doing his job, to represent the president, not be his pr guy, be his lawyer. seeing him take this tact now, i think knowing rudy, he has reason for it, i just don't see how it turns out to his best interest. >> i can't imagine what that would be. >> as we talked yesterday, the people you are calling storm troopers are the people he relied on after 9/11 walking with masks on their face. the southern district of new york where he issued the subpoena. these are people he knows, respected and worked with.

>> he was able to sell himself out in this way so quickly. let's not forget, rudy said it will be wrapped up in two or three weeks, he might be wrapping it up now. >> you may be right. >> you quoted what michael cohen's reaction was to the fbi coming in. >> he was surprised, but professional and courteous. >> i want to pause, rudy giuliani, you loved him back then, i think he exploited 9/11. >> a lot of people thought he did well. >> but, he went on national television and compared the fbi, the guys that risk their lives every day to nazi storm troopers. pause for that a second. what a despicable, despicable, pathetic man. i'm sorry. >> yeah. >> back to the legal questions. giuliani, when he talked to nbc news last night said trump made 12 payments beginning in january of 2017 in installments of

$35,000 each to michael cohen, then that was the money that was used to pay off giuliani says, unbeknownst to the president to pay off stormy daniels. what do the payments look like to you? is that a normal relationship between a client and his attorney? does that look like a retainer to you? >> i can see giuliani's strategy. he's trying to break up the payments so they don't seem so connected to a $130,000 payment. if trump reimbursed him dollar for dollar in one payment, that shows a connection. instead, what i think giuliani is trying to do is show that, instead, trump paid a certain amount every month to create this sort of pool of retainer/funds in order to pay settlements as cohen sees fit. the problem is that approach is at least under the rules of ethics, it might create issues. attorneys have to keep their accounts very, very separate.

it's one of the number one reasons attorneys get in trouble is creating any gray area between their client trust account and operating account. even if this was reimbursement for a loan made by the attorney, which by the way under new york ethics rules, attorneys are not supposed to advance the cost of settlement. they can advance deposition fees but paying a settlement and getting reimburses is running afoul in spirit of the rules. then you have the challenge of this payment coming in. where did cohen put this money? did it go into his operating account? did he submit hourly invoices and bill it against the client trust account? this money creates a paper trail and characterizing it as a loan trips a lot of wires, so, too, does it if you characterize it as a retainer. that trips a lot of professional

responsibility wires that require accounting and have questions that need to be answered. coming up on "morning joe" f the president lies about crowd size and voting fraud, will americans believe him in the case of a real crisis? a new piece on the threat of a commander and chief crying wolf. "morning joe" is coming right back. ♪ if you have moderate to severe plaque psoriasis, little things can be a big deal. that's why there's otezla. otezla is not an injection or a cream. it's a pill that treats psoriasis differently. with otezla, 75% clearer skin is achievable after just 4 months, ... with reduced redness, thickness, and scaliness of plaques. and the otezla prescribing information

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"the washington post" found as of may 1st, the president has told more than 3,000 false or misleading claims. yesterday, press secretary sarah huckabee sanders was asked about her job in the face of so many presidential lies. >> when the president so often says things that turn out not to be true, when the president and the white house show what appears to be a blatant disregard to the truth, how do the american people trust or believe what is said her or by the president? >> we give the very best information that we have at the time. i do that every single day and will continue to do that every day under this position. >> so, here is our colleague, nicolle wallace who was

communications director for the george w. bush white house reacting yesterday to sanders. >> two sources told me this week, the reason sarah huckabee sanders -- i watched a briefing. it was a tragedy. it wasn't funny. she took to the briefing. that room, you can tell when you lost the room. she lost the room today. today, the room wanted to know why she comes out there and spews bs every day. why does she lie to them every day? i don't know what their recourse is. i think they are done reporting on what comes out of that podium. she has been a proven liar by her boss. one of the explanations i have heard is when she goes to the president and asks about stormy daniels, he has three versions of the truth. whatever he hands out is what she has to serve in the briefing room. >> nicolle wallace, as you know, served as communications

director in the bush white house and has insight on how to do the job. the editorial board is out with a column entitled the stormy daniels damage. most storms pass, eventually. this week, donald trump tried to say stormy daniel doesn't reign a permanent distraction with the cost of further damage to him, his deceptions are relevant to the job as president and the attempted cover up has done greater harm than any affair would have. now, as more of the story emerged, he wants everyone to believe a new story he could have told the first time. mr. trump is compiling record that few will believe him during a genuine crisis, say a dispute over speaking with special counsel, robert mueller or a nuclear showdown with kim jong-un. mr. trump should worry that americans should stop believing anything he says. >> here is the problem with

that. sobering problem. his numbers are up a few points. they are in the low 40s, but they are up. whether it's because of north korea or because his base, plus a few, just are not buying. obviously we'll see what comes out with the indictments and as mueller goes forward. the real tragedy in this is beyond the presidency, the mirror coming back that a huge part of this country is not paying attention. >> then there's the issue of rudy giuliani, trump's chump and sarah sanders. what category do we put her in? is she another that can't contain the president, can't say no, mr. president, i'm not going to lie or how would you characterize what we are seeing happening in the press briefings, which are important because this is the white house going on the record. it is the white house's statement or responding to

questions and giving the white house's take. have we ever gotten the white house's take on any legitimate questions out of those press briefings? have we gotten truth out of them? have they come to the point where not only has she lost the room, but they are null and void? >> that's the challenge for her and the country. let's not forget, she is not just there speaking on behalf of the president, she is speaking to the country from the white house. she is telling the public lies when she goes out there. she's not just lying to the press corps. donald trump has no problem lying to the press corps. she is lying to the american public. i think she needs to own that. anyone, whether it be her or anyone out there, whoever is going to be at the podium is going to be in the exact position as sarah sanders. there's no way beyond that. it is disturbing. i have stood up for clients before and dealt with certain uncomfortable things.

being ignorant or lying is no excuse. >> is no comment a better option? >> why have the briefings? if you are just going to lie, why bother? coming up, breaking news on the economic front. we'll get a live report from cnbc next on "morning joe." so, that goal you've been saving for,

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jeff and market volatility into retirement. isn't top of mind.

that's because they have a shield annuity from brighthouse financial, which allows them to take advantage of growth opportunities in up markets, while maintaining a level of protection in down markets. so they're less concerned with market volatility and can focus more on the things they're passionate about. talk with your advisor about shield annuities from brighthouse financial- established by metlife. all right, we have breaking economic news right now with the r release of the monthly jobs report. sarah? >> this is a good report. the big headline, 3.9%. that is the nation's unemployment rate and that is the lowest rate since back in december, 2000, during the dot com years. as far as the jobs added in

april, 164,000. that is a little light. economists were looking for a number of 195,000 jobs. but, still, it keeps pace with population growth and points to a healthy and tightening labor market in this country. also want to mention the wages number. we have been looking for signs that wages are starting to finally pick up. they only grew about four cents on the month, that's 2.6% from where we were last year. it's decent, it's solid wage growth, but actually lower than expected. economists wanted to see 2.7%. not spectacular wage growth, but therein lies the market reaction. the market loves this number. stocks are rallying in the premarket action. it points to an economy where jobs are growing, things are looking good. 3.9% unemployment, that's a wow number. no signs of inflation. the federal reserve doesn't need

to get super aggressive when it comes to interest rates. i know you like to look, it slipped a tenth of a percent, 62.8 is the share of the population in the work force. i'll continue to dig through the numbers. for sure, you are going to hear about the 3.9% unemployment rate. things are tightening as companies continue to look and fill jobs. the question is, and it's a bit of a mystery, why aren't they paying them more? >> exactly. very good question. sarah eisen, thank you. >> 3.9 jobs. >> i know. >> if he does the north korea thing, isis. this man, unless there's serious stuff in these indictments is going to -- >> steve, 3.9, below 4%

unemployment for the first time since 2000, 18 years, a little under 18 years. i know it's not the be all, end all number, but it's a good number. >> i think donny is right, it's a good number. sarah is right, the keeny numbe are at a sweet spot. wages are not growing fast. that's not great news. on another level, it keeps inflation from coming back and the fed from raiseing interest rates. what we have is a fire burning nicely in the economy and we are putting gasoline on it in the form of tax cuts and spending increases. i take donny's point, in the fall of 2020, if the economy looks like this, it will be very good for donald trump. it has a long way to go to get from here to there without an economic bump in the road. >> and politically this is -- >> it's interesting.

if you notice, donald trump has not talked about the stock market like he used to. >> it's not going up. >> it's a challenge for him. he likes to talk about it and he hasn't been able to use that. politically, the numbers are good, but not a talking point he wants to use. >> all right. "morning joe" has gotten an early look at senator john mccain's forthcoming book "the restless waves." it's going to be released may 22nd. in it, mccain writes about his no vote on obamacare repeal and while he felt bad about disappointing his fellow republicans, he says i got a kick out of the stories that diagrammed my colleagues reaction pointing out the look on the senators face and how this senator craned her neck to see better. president obama thanked me. i appreciated his call.

my purpose was to preserve his signature accomplishment, but insist on a better alternative and give the senate the opportunity to find one. he hadn't called to lobby me before the vote, which i appreciated. mccain said it was the first time he had heard from obama since being e lektelected to a h term. mccain writes of the arrival in the 2008 rate. obama added, he was counting on me to be an outspoken and independent voice for causes i believed in. i thanked him and said i would try to be. willie? paul ryan is resersing course and keeping on father patrick conroy. ryan asked him to step aside last month. yesterday, he spent a letter to the house speaker rescinding his resignation. he wrote, i have never been

disciplined, rep remanded or heard a complaint about my ministry during my time as house chaplain. when asked the chief of staff why he was being let go, he was told maybe it's time we had a chaplain that wasn't a catholic. ryan's chief of staff took issue with the version of events and said he strongly disagrees with conroy's recklation of their conversation. shortly after, stressing his intent to stay on, speaker ryan said i have accepted the letter and decided he will remain in his position as chaplain of the house. ryan insisted, again, the firing was about pastoral care and had nothing to do with politics. >> serious question, why isn't there a house rabbi? >> okay. >> he is part of a great group. >> i can't answer that question for you. >> that story -- >> the answer is yes.

there should be. maybe there is. is there? >> i want to talk to schumer about that. >> everyone stop. just stop. it's not going to go well. it's like rudy giuliani. it's not going to go well. president trump and vice president pence are both scheduled to speak at the nra convention in dallas. the speeches follow the president's tough talk in february when he admonished pat toomey and joe manchin in 2013. >> i was curious what you did in your bill. >> we didn't address it. >> why? because you are afraid of the nra. they have great power, i agree with that. they have great power over you people. they have less power over me. what do i need? >> will the president show his independence today? we are in dallas and filed this report. >> parkland florida students head to prom this weekend,

politicians on the right are headed to dallas. president trump and vice president pence address the national rifle association today. >> wanlts to take your guns away. >> reporter: in 2016, they bet $100 million on trump and when mass shootings reopened the gun debate -- >> take the guns first, due process next. >> reporter: a lot of talk. >> people are afraid to do background checks. >> reporter: little action. bump stops were notorious. >> bump stocks, we are writing that out. >> reporter: it took four months and 17 gunned down at a high school for trump to sign a piece of paper. >> a memorandum to propose regulations to ban devices that turn legal weapons into machine guns. >> reporter: a proposal that will remain in the comment stage until next month. on capitol hill, school safety spending. coming nowhere close to demands from student survivors and march

for our lives. >> the goal is ban assault rifles. >> reporter: the nra belittled them as opportunists. >> the only reason we have heard of them is because guns didn't come soon enough. the classmates would be alive and no one would know your names. >> reporter: the president failed to challenge the nra the way he promised to. >> there's nothing to be afraid of. >> reporter: the question is, will he do it today? for now, the activists pack the streets. >> no means no. >> reporter: but the nra has the president's ear. >> i think the nra wants to do what is right. they are close to me and i am close to them. >> vaughn joins us live outside the venue in dallas. vaughn, what do you think can be expected, do you think? >> reporter: we are going hear from the president and the vice president this morning. as we noted at the top of the piece, the contrast is stark, if you are looking over what is

happening in parkland, florida this weekend with prom. a couple parkland students this last weekend. i asked them, you know, not much legislation is actually taken place. they haven't taken from 19-21, the age which somebody is able to purchase a semiautomatic rifle and the mansion/toomey bill hasn't done anything. we are going to be out this summer on the campaign trail making our voices heard. this time, it's different. republicans are going to see if that comes to fruition at the ballot box. i was in wisconsin at a march for our lives. not a single republican showed up to more than one of 500 town halls across the country calling for gun control reform. today, hearing from the president who joe manchin, you heard that soundbyte, the president calling out joe

manchin and senator toomey for not being tough on nra. he said it is ultimately going to be the president who decides what happens. so far, that hasn't been much. >> vaughn, it's willie. the way this works is the nra says this is not a time for politics, let the victims heal and we'll talk about guns later on. has the nra shown willingness post parkland to make moves to perhaps go along with the ban of bump stocks as the president proposed? is there anything the nra is willing to budge on? the argument is it's a slippery slope. if you give in on one thing, it opens the door to guns being taken away. has nra been responsive in any way to what parkland put out there and the things the president put out there? >> reporter: it's not been responsive. at this point, if you are looking at the nra and watch, i'll say, watch fox news last night and see the multiple

segments, there's a fear they are propagating the democrats want to take everybody's guns. when looking at the pieces of legislation, the nra hasn't backed the background bill. it was put up in 2013 with the backing there after the shooting in tucson. it was to expand background checks for the purchase of online and gun show sales. nra, if you talk to a lot of people, including those voters out there, they say that's not too much to ask. the nra has never taken a supportive stance on an issue like that. >> msnbc's vaughn hilliard, thank you very much. >> thanks, vaughan. don blankenship wrapped up his attack on mitch mcconnell in this new ad. take a look. >> mitch mcconnell created millions of jobs for china people. while doing so, mitch has gotten rich. in fact, his china family has given him tens of millions of dollars. mitch's people are running false

negative ads against me. i will beat him for the sake of the kids. >> oh, my god. >> that's a real ad. >> this is a guy who went to jail for a year because of the coal mines where people were killed. >> 29 people were killed. >> he just said china people. china people. >> he said it's not racism, he's not talking about race. >> china people. cocaine mitch, i hate to defend him, but his family owns a big cargo company. on one ship there was some. in level of dispickibility, the poignant thing about the truth, that can go on. >> help us with the republican party. >> it's really hard. it's because of the president, donald trump and his presidency and how he ran his campaign and is running this country that

allows this. there's no repercussions for running these types of ads. he used to be taken out of town by a state leader. no one cares anymore. >> donny, nbc news does not have evidence of the ad running on west virginia air waves yet. earlier this week, blankenship ran a television ad referencing a 2014 report that drugs were once found aboard a shipping vessel owned by the majority leader's father-in-law's ship. the aligned superpac spent $1.3 million on negative ads against the former coal executive. when asked for response, they pointed nbc to the former chief of staff, josh holmes who tweeted this is in response to roy moore, this clown is a walking, talking case study for

the limitation of a person's ability to rehabilitate. donald trump jr. weighed in tweeting, i hate to lose, so i'm going to go out on a limb and ask the people of west virginia to make a wise decision and reject blankenship. no more fumbles like alabama. we need to win in november. >> not that he's scum and said the most racist thing you could say and went to jail for 29 people's deaths, but because we can't let alabama have it again. >> i'll take it. >> a terrible candidate. >> just this morning, the candidate responded to don jr. on twitter saying the president's son had been misinformed and misled by mcconnell's cronies. >> susan, to your point, there's a climate and atmosphere where it's okay to wear bigotry on your sleeve, put it out there in

explicit terms. saying china people because mitch mcconnell's wife has chinese heritage. >> there's no one holding people like this accountable. yes, we can go after him in this one case saying deplorable things and making no sense and brand him as the bad candidate. what if he is the republican nominee, just like roy moore. that's the test for the party. they have to make sure that does not happen. >> that's why mcconnell is doing what he is doing. if you look at the polls, blankenship is behind in the polls. by the way, he lives in las vegas. >> he does? >> but he pays more taxes? west virginia. >> i think this is the trickle down of the trump presidency. i mean, where else -- >> the trickle down, this is what's scaring me. when the indictments come and say it does go down the line and they are trying to remove trump

from office, it will be a civil war in this country. he is teeing it up the way he did with hillary. he will take it to the streets. that route is going to close for him and only route he has is the court of public opinion, which certainly does not work in the actual courts, but this country is going to fracture. this is really scary stuff. >> stirring up divides that we really actually want to be working against. so it is another head-spinning week, full of some mind-boggling political stories. this is the week where we reported a few days ago that john kelly called the president an idiot. that was this week. >> that was two days ago. >> crazy. >> isn't it crazy? it's gotten uglier, dirtier, if that's possible. a nice palate cleanser. carol burnett next.

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and it's also a story mail aabout people and while we make more e-commerce deliveries to homes than anyone else in the country, we never forget... that your business is our business the united states postal service. priority: you we're on a mission to show drip coffee drinkers, it's time to wake up to keurig. wakey! wakey! rise and shine! oh my gosh! how are you? well watch this. i pop that in there.

press brew. that's it. look how much coffee's in here? fresh coffee. so rich. i love it. that's why you should be a keurig man! full-bodied. are you sure you're describing the coffee and not me? do you wear this every day? everyday. i'd never take it off. are you ready to say goodbye to it? go! go! ta da! a terrarium. that's it. we brewed the love, right guys? (all) yes. let me tell you something. >> adults need help because they have big-time issues, you know. so they need help from kids who have clear minds and can think up new solutions. >> the kids are smart and the grown-ups are too old. >> grown-ups would come to kids for help because kids have imaginations and they know what they're talking about. we know things that we're not supposed to know. and we're pretty smart about it. >> if you really need the truth,

just come to us kids. >> i pretty much have all the solutions. >> that was a look at the new show out today on netflix called a little help with carol burnett. carol recently celebrated 50 years of the carol burnett show and now her latest endeavor is an unscripted series in which she and a host of celebrity guests are joined by a group, as you saw there, of straight-talking 5 to 9-year-olds. very brave of you, carol. who offered their expertised on life's everyday problems. the award-winning actress, comedian and singer -- >> what an honor. >> the great carol burnett joins us now. >> thank you, glad to be here. >> tell us about this show. i mean, it's sort of a model that for me never gets old which is just putting the honesty of kids front and center. >> that's why, you know, you mentioned the age range, 5 to 9. they don't sensor themselves at that age. they haven't become jaded yet. you know. and not thinking, oh, should i

say this or what should i do here. their thinking comes right out. they're real kid. they're not actors. and so we present them during the show with three people, grown-ups, come out separately, and they present the kids with an adult dilemma. and these kids give their advice on what they should do to solve these problems. >> how is their advice? >> truthful and -- i mean, i don't think i was that smart when i was 7, you know. today, it's just amazing. and yet there's this wonderful, again that age range, innocence about them, you know. so -- and it's, you know, not scripted. the kids don't know what they're going to get. i'm the host. russell peters, a wonderful comedian, he's my side kick. we just rolled with it. you know, no rehearsal of course, you know, or anything. >> how fun.

>> the third grown-up was a celebrity like, for instance, lisa kudrow came on, was one, and wanda sykes, mark cuban and so forth. >> what a great idea. >> your career has represented a smile on the face of america, with very few exceptions of serious roles that you've done. in your comedic life, when you have a bad day, how do you get the job done of putting that smile on america's face? >> well, i don't know. the adrenaline kicks in, you know. and we're all actors when we get up there. and also what always helped me when we did our show was we had a live studio audience. and we also did our show like you would do a broadway show with very few -- i'd change clothes real fast. i'd kid the crew. i'd say -- i can do a skin-out change faster than you guys can

move that sofa across the stage. i wanted that studio audience to be with us. you know. and it's just -- i don't know, as i said, the adrenaline kicks in. at that moment, that's all that matters is the fact that you're in the here and the now. >> let's talk about the netflix show and how important it is. talk about why especially in these days we find ourselves in. talk about why it's so important for people to tune in to this show. >> well, what's really nice is back in the covered wagon days when we were doing my show, you know, it was appointment television. and people would sit around with the family and watch together and laugh together and there were only three channels so we would have as many as 30 million people a week watching that saturday night lineup we had. and i think with this netflix thing, it's so funny, it's

innocent, and yet it's very smart. these kids are smart. and i think that -- i'm hoping that families will get together and be able to watch. because not too many can watch even some of the sitcoms today because, you know, they say -- they kind of go into the -- >> with carol burnett, can't wait to see it, premiering today on netflix. that does it for us this morning. stephanie ruhle picks up the coverage. >> my god, carol burnett, how awesome was that. a lot to cover today. starting with paul manafort back in court. as we are learning special counsel mueller requested 70 blank subpoenas. and caught off guard. members of president trump's legal team absolutely stunned after rudy giuliani reveals the president reimbursed michael cohen for his payment to stormy

daniels. >> when did you specifically know that the president repaid mr. cohen for the $130,000? you personally? >> the first awareness i had was during the interview last night. >> plus, money, power, politics. epa chief scott pruitt still in the news, facing new questions about his travel, his home and campaign payments. and you know what today is, jobs, jobs, jobs day. 164,000 jobs added in april. the unemployment rate now at just 3.9%. extraordinary. what's not extraordinary is wages, not up as much as we thought. not up as much as we hoped. we're going to get to all of it. but first, let's go to alexandria, virginia. that is where a hearing is getting under way for a president's former campaign manager paul manafort. he's going to try to get all of the criminal charges against him dropped. nbc news has a reporter in the